Testimony: Brutal Police Violence on the Serbian-Hungarian Border

Testimonies of two people who experienced brutal police violence on the Serbian-Hungarian border. This is only one of many similar cases of violent police attacks on people at the border.

It seems that this kind of incidents have become "normal", at least it is not specially mentioned. As always when it comes to violence from the side of police and the state its not being discussed. The systematic character of beating people up is not put in question while somebody who is objecting this violence, is treated as a "public enemy", called "terrorist", called whatever.

We are asking ourselves about the purpose of this kind of documentation and publishing , obviously there are so many cases but no public debate on how to change it.

The talk happened on the 6th of August 2016, in Belgrade.

"It was on the 2nd of August between 2.30-3 AM at night, we were about 20 persons in the group, we reached only half km away from the fence on the Hungarian side, we were caught by the hungarian police. They came with 5-6 police cars, we knew that we should not run, we did not try to run away, just sat down. They beat us very badly, the two of us got beaten up the most, because the other guys were younger and physically weaker. Some of the police was wearing black phantom masks, we could feel from the smell of alcohol that they were drunk. They were beating us with rubber-iron sticks, pepper-spray a nd leashing dogs on us. Our eyes were burning, we even could not see how many of them were beating us. They broke my head, i was blooding, i tried to tell them to stop it, but they beat me even more, and kicked me into my chest.

They were drunk, they were laughing constantly, having fun, and telling us that we are terrorists. Beat and laugh, beat and laugh. We could not move at all.

When they got enough of fun, they pushed us into a car, and brought us back to Horgos. There was a small door on the fence, they kicked us back through that door. We found ourselves in the Horgos camp, it was early morning, we could not walk. It took us the whole day to get back to Subotica by foot. We lost all of our money, the bus driver did not want to take us. We were all in blood, maybe he was afraid to let us in. It was very hard, it?s just 15min by car but we walked very slowly the whole day, nobody wanted to help us.

After some people got us a ticket and we came back to Belgrade. The doctors from the park took me to the hospital. It was 4 days ago, i am still all in pain, can?t sleep at night, from the pain and from the stress."